Recommendations for a laptop for GCSEs.

[Buzzybea82]

Hi there, my ds is in year 11 and he's in desperate need of a laptop. Looking for recommendations for a good one please 🙏 we will have to get on a monthly plan

Many thanks in advance

Just spend the most you can afford. My IT buddy says it doesn’t matter what you get if you are spending less than £1000 😯I would dial that down to £600 - that’s what mine cost 2 yrs ago and it’s ace - but much below that and they’re all much if a muchness imo.

What’s your budget?

Depends what the monthly payment is but I'd say £500 or under.

I would just see what the best offer PC World have for £500 tbh. There may be an ex-display one, for example, with a higher spec but reduced price. Or an older model that is being replaced with a new colour so it's cheaper.

Amazon ( and others) often do refurbished ones much cheaper. We bought DS an ASUS ZenBook 14in i5 8GB 256GB Laptop - 957/1437 from Argos for £499 in summer for 6th form. Now out of stock but would suggest similar.

Is this just for work, or for gaming too?

For GCSE/college he needs what?
Up to date operating system, MS Office/Student (might be supplied by college), internet access. Not loads of fancy features.

Gaming will require better spec graphics/speed etc.

We got ds' from the Dell website and it works well. Do ask the school for minimum specifications needed. We were quite surprised how high they recommended due to some of the programmes that go on it from school.

We didn't go for the bottom end of what they recommended, and I think we spent around £700 to get one quite a lot better than the minimum, but it didn't cost that much more.

I don't know if they do data plans though.

We've used refurbished ones before and they've been fine (think one pixel missing or similar), but you want to make sure if he's carrying it back and forward to school he has a good bag that protects it and it's going to be robust.

The good thing about Dell is their customer service seems to be good. Ds' screen dropped a couple of months ago and they sent an engineer out to mend it the next day. I thought they might well question about whether it was damage (being a 15yo carrying it round in a school bag) but, no, they just fixed it (for free as it's under warranty)

DD uses a laptop for everything at school - has done since Y6 - and switched last year to using an ipad with keyboard and e-pen.

Cheaper, lighter, has the camera function which is handy for taking pics of the board or of handouts that can then be annotated using the pen. She last charged the keyboard about 3 months ago and that is with daily use.

There doesn't seem to be any upside to having a laptop - iPads can have Windows 365 installed for word, excel etc - unless you are doing the kind of stuff that you really need a powerful Mac for.

Hi, unless you're be doing anything too advanced on the laptop, you can get anything that suits your budget - even second hand.
For GCSEs, students would mainly use it for researching and reading information online, perhaps using online resources for practice. So technically the most important thing would be a decently sized screen. Unless your son would wat to carry the laptop a lot with him. Then consider the size and especially weight. Sadly, more lightweight laptops are usually expensive (if they're also large enough for a comfortable use of the screen).
You might not need high specs and any "usual" disc space should be enough - anywhere from 500 GB to 1 TB should be enough for storing documents. I would suggest storing documents online as well anyway as a backup - essays, coursework, lesson notes,... (for example on your google drive that has 15 GB for free with every gmail account).
One more thing, again, just about the size of the screen - again, the larger, the better when using whiteboard for online tuition. But almost every laptop is better than a tablet, so if your son would ever need tuition where the tutor would be using whiteboard (like I do in my maths lessons), any laptop is good choice. On that note, additional features for the said tuition like a webcam and a headset are usually not needed with decent laptops but can be always bought extra should the need arise, so you don't have to worry about that either if you're on a tight budget and online tuition is not on your radar as a priority.

Check out any requirements for sixth form, if applicable. Battery life may be an important consideration, as they may not be able to charge it during the day.